POLITICS: THE REPUBLICAN;Dole Retreats From His Call To Void Ban On 19 Guns

As he did with the explosive issue of abortion, Bob Dole seemed to take another step toward the political center today, backing off his earlier opposition to an assault-weapons ban enacted two years ago.

But his remarks were so oblique that he may have confused his position rather than clarifying it. While his muted language spared him immediate criticism from the gun lobby, it was not clear whether his message today reached its objective: suburban Republican women, who strongly support the ban and so far have not supported Mr. Dole, the apparent Republican Presidential nominee.

At a speech to about 150 people at the Virginia state police headquarters here, Mr. Dole said the ban, on the manufacture and importing of 19 kinds of assault weapons, had been ineffective. Then he added:

"So what I say, let's move, that we've moved beyond the debate, in my view, over banning assault weapons. Sounds good. It's a nice sound bite. You can say it on television, and everybody thinks they're safe. But we've got to move beyond the sound bite, as somebody said. We've got to move beyond banning assault weapons, and instead of endlessly debating which guns to ban we ought to be emphasizing what works."

Last year, as majority leader of the Senate, Mr. Dole told the National Rifle Association that repealing the "ill conceived" ban was one of his legislative priorities.

The ban was a provision of 1994 anti-crime legislation signed into law by President Clinton. When the Republicans took control of Congress last year, they moved to repeal that provision, but the effort fizzled with the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

As word that Mr. Dole intended to back off his earlier support for repeal seeped from his campaign early today and then circulated on Capitol Hill, House Republican leaders were distressed that he was leaving their members in the lurch. A Republican close to the campaign said after the speech that this concern was the reason the candidate had not declared his position more forthrightly.

Mr. Dole's organization evinced confusion throughout the day about exactly what he intended to say. Early in the day, aides said he would retreat completely from his opposition to the assault-weapons ban. After he had delivered his more limited remarks, he departed for a fund raiser, leaving a swarm of reporters to seek clarification from his press secretary, Nelson Warfield, and again demonstrating the difficulty of his ongoing political balancing act, in which he seeks to appeal to moderates without alienating his party's conservative base.

Mr. Warfield would say little other than that Mr. Dole's speech "speaks for itself."

"The debate has moved beyond the ban," Mr. Warfield said, "and it's not on his agenda." Asked several times whether or not Mr. Dole still favored repealing the ban, Mr. Warfield said, "He wants to focus on what works."

What would work, in Mr. Dole's view, is a nationwide system of instant computerized checks of prospective gun buyers for disqualifying factors like felony convictions or mental incompetence. His speech today was devoted to the instant check, which he has long supported, as has the gun lobby. But his comments on the assault-weapons ban overshadowed the rest of his talk.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The weapons ban has not been an issue in the campaign so far, but the Clinton camp believes that the President's unequivocal support for the ban, which is popular with the vast majority of voters, has been a mainstay of his political strength.

Mr. Dole's campaign said his image had suffered, particularly among women, from a perception that he favored protecting assault weapons. But his statement of retreat today was so elliptical that supporters of gun control were unconvinced that this was a sincere step in their direction, or even a discernible one.

Sarah Brady, chairwoman of Handgun Control Inc., appealed to Mr. Dole to clarify his position. "As President," she asked, "would you veto a repeal measure? Would you actively oppose it? Until those questions are answered, we cannot 'get beyond the assault-weapons ban,' as you are trying to do."

The Clinton campaign also took aim at what it called Mr. Dole's failure to make a decisive statement. "Bob Dole has managed to confuse everyone on an important issue," said Joe Lockhart, a campaign spokesman. "America's police officers can't afford to guess where Bob Dole is on the issue of assault weapons."

Asked whether the Dole campaign had spoken to the National Rifle Association in advance of the speech, Mr. Warfield said the candidate was "running for President of the United States, not president of the National Rifle Association."

But if this was meant to distance Mr. Dole from the gun lobby, the gun lobby did not get the message.

"If I heard it, I would deal with it," she added. "I deal with reality. I'm a sophisticated enough person to know that when someone wants to say something they say it, and when they don't want to say something they don't."

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 1996, on Page B00008 of the National edition with the headline: POLITICS: THE REPUBLICAN;Dole Retreats From His Call To Void Ban On 19 Guns. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe